Or not.
In a Friday op-ed centered on California’s hog-raising requirements for pork sold in the State, Robert Alt, President and CEO of the Buckeye Institute had this throw-away line:
California—which boasts of recent policies that require residents to reduce electricity use to prevent rolling blackouts….
The only State—and possibly the first nation in the world—to institutionalize steady state brownouts.
What a legacy for the Progressive-Democratic Party running California.
That’s what the Progressive-Democratic Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, is saying about the influx of illegal aliens into his city, a city that is proudly sanctuary to illegal aliens. So he’s declared a “state of emergency” over that influx.
These are the statistics Adams is citing:
Never mind that more than 2 million illegal aliens have flooded across our wide open southern border this year—and the year is not over. The Dell Rio sector, which includes the city of Eagle Pass, had 350,000 illegal aliens come through. The El Paso sector is getting 1,000 to 1,300 illegal aliens per night.
And none of that includes the unknown number of illegal aliens who got across our border undetected, no does it include the hundreds of thousands of gotaways, those known to have crossed illegally, but escaped capture.
Nor does any of that include the massive amounts of drugs flooding across our southern border carried by so many of those illegal aliens.
Nor does any of that include the crimes the illegal aliens commit once across our southern border, crimes ranging from petty theft through vandalism to killing pets to killing livestock to robberies and murders. None of which the illegals bused to Adams’ sanctuary are doing.
Adams at least knows all of the illegal aliens he’s whining about sheltering in his sanctuary city.
Adams thinks what he’s getting is unsustainable. He needs to come down to the border, do a ride-along with the border patrol along the border, get out on the river with the border patrol—see what unsustainable really is. And quit his crocodile tears.
UK Prime Minister Liz Truss withdrew her plan to reduce the Brits’ top tax bracket from 45% on annual incomes above £150,000 (roughly $169,000) to 40% amid a panicky self-serving outcry from the liberal Labourites and too many entrenched pseudo-conservatives among the Tories. The rest of her tax reduction and energy subsidy package seems to remain intact.
In the scheme of things politics, though, it seems to me that withdrawing that top tier tax cut is a small price to pay in order to get the rest of the tax cuts to pass. And it may be (though I frankly doubt it) that Truss deliberately overbid her tax cut package in order to allow herself be talked down a little bit to get to a package that could pass after her concession but that could not pass had she made her bid from the jump without the cut from 45%.
Regardless, the biggest error, and one that no one in Socialist Great Britain is decrying, is that enormous energy subsidy to businesses and households, ostensibly to help them pay for skyrocketing energy costs. Sure, the subsidy is supposed to be sunsetted after two years, but most of us know how well sunsetting works with subsidies.
Instead, the subsidies will serve only to maintain the current sky high energy prices to the end users and to consumers in all economic strata, all of whom must buy food, and housing, and transportation—all of which depend on energy.
The smarter way to reduce those energy costs would have been to push further deregulation of British domestic fossil fuel energy production and delivery. Truss is moving to allow fracking to resume, but that’s only a start.
Acting Archivist of the United States Debra Steidel Wall claims the National Archives hasn’t received all the presidential records that were supposed to be turned over at the end of the Trump administration. She wrote this to House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D, NY) in all seriousness:
While there is no easy way to establish absolute accountability, we do know that we do not have custody of everything we should[.]
And
Specifically, Mr. Ferriero informed you in his February 18, 2022, letter that NARA [National Archives & Records Administration] has identified that some White House staff conducted official business using non-official electronic messaging accounts that were not copied or forwarded into their official electronic messaging accounts, as required by section 2209 of the PRA [Presidential Records Act]. NARA has been able to obtain such records from a number of former officials and will continue to pursue the return of similar types of Presidential records from former officials.
Since Wall has succeeded in tracking down “missing” records of messaging accounts by tracking down the messages’ recipients, on what basis does she claim there are further such accounts—or is she simply…assuming?
In the end, if she doesn’t know, by her own statement, how does she know? Or is Wall just another Party acolyte making politically convenient allegations without any substantiation at all?
Wall’s letter can be read here.
Congressman Andrew Clyde (R, GA) has legislation he intends to introduce that would bar
federal officials from collaborating with Big Tech to censor Americans’ voices and create some legal recourse for those harmed by free speech infringement.
Explicitly, Clyde said,
It would also give an opportunity for those people who have been harmed by it to take legal action[.]
It’s a promising start, but I suggest a couple of fillips. One is to explicitly bar the agencies and departments of which those officials are a part from spending any money on the collaboration.
The other is to hold the agency and department heads and deputy heads personally liable for violating this law, regardless of who in their organization actually did the deed(s): these two are the MFWICs, and nothing goes on in their organization without their permission, if only because these two create the culture within which the misbehavior occurs and/or have the lax enforcement processes that let this sort of misbehavior go “unnoticed.”
In addition to that, and as a means of giving teeth to the responsibility deeming, the legislation should explicitly remove sovereign immunity and qualified immunity as defenses for the organization heads and deputy heads and the person(s) who actually did the deed.
Clyde needs to follow through on this, with the added fillips, as soon as Republicans gain majorities in both houses of Congress (whenever that happens), get the bill passed, and get it signed into law—or force President Joe Biden (D) to veto it, thereby demonstrating Progressive-Democrats’ continued insistence on government censorship of us citizens’ speech.